I'm looking for the backgrounds for the item icons (the little 'puffball' that is colored from gray to blue to etc. based on rarity) but I cannot seem to find them, not even the base gray one. They don't seem to be in the regular icon files, unlike the spell icons (where the background colors are included in those DDS files).

Does anyone happen to know where they are, or at least where the base gray one is? I took a brief look in the vpk files but didn't see it there either (but that's kind of a tricky thing to navigate, I didn't look through all of it).

Anyone know if the colours for the 'puffball' are in the dds files anywhere, or what the colours are? I have the border and brown puffball, but I'm not sure how to get it tinted properly with Photoshop - I need blank ones of each colour.

Anyone know if the colours for the 'puffball' are in the dds files anywhere, or what the colours are? I have the border and brown puffball, but I'm not sure how to get it tinted properly with Photoshop - I need blank ones of each colour.

The colored ones are not in the DDS directly, they're generated at runtime sadly.

If you don't want to fiddle with guess-and-check tinting in photoshop, what you might be able to do is to find the icon of an item you have of a given rarity and try editing the DDS to remove the icon (make it blank) that way you could take a screenshot and get just the tinted puffball.

Oooo, interesting idea. By 'make it blank', would I paint it black to match the background of the file? And where would I put it after that? (I'm using EQ2Map, and have a folder for that, but I'm completely new at installing changed DDS files).

The icon files are in UI/Default/images/icons/. To use a custom one, you'd put it in UI/WhateverYourCustomUIIs/images/icons and keep the name the same (eg icon_is55.dds would stay named icon_is55.dds).

By making it blank, I meant making it transparent. But thinking again, Drums has the right idea of it, you need to edit the alpha layer and make it entire black, as that will make it transparent. Making the content (what you normally see) anything different would just overlay that on top, you have to use the alpha layer to make it transparent.

I followed the directions in the sticky thread about the alpha channel. I saved the files as ARGB 8 bpp | 256 colors + alpha, No MIP maps, 2d Texture. When I'm loading the game, I get a crash with "Unknown DDS texture flags" 00a64dad 2930e920. Am I not using the right settings?

If you're using photoshop with the nvidia plugin, save it as DXT3 (ARGB 8bbp | explicit alpha), 2D texture, no MIP maps. I don't have experience editing DDS in any other application, but in photoshop those are the settings I've used that have worked fine.